Reflections on the arts

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Buoyed by my successful return to Poetry Unplugged at the Poetry Cafe in London last week, I decided to try some of my prose there too. Trying to stay within the spirit of the event I picked a somewhat lyrical piece, Perfect Pitch. What follows below is Perfect Pitch (Live), an updated, and dare I say improved, version that better suits the spoken word. I received some brilliant feedback from the audience, so I hope you enjoy it too.

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Perfect Pitch (Live)

There’s a tragic symmetry to the receptions that greet both ends of a housing project – fêted inauguration, fated implosion. The violent end becomes a spectator sport suffused with blood-lust, a way of forgetting the collective embarrassment. Anything goes in a crowd.

Hope was there at the beginning, as too were financial constraints, the convenience of easy solutions and relief of an imminent end – all cast aside by a willingness to believe, or self-deceive. Then that hope became Hype, the belief lost all sense of self and together spawned hubris.

High-concept sketches scrawled in a thick, black crayon were the kindling, elaborated in balsa the metaphorical became literal. Each artwork came wrapped in seductive writing that spun a carefully-calibrated narrative – a soothing emollient for the rough spots of groupthought.

Others demand more, and are given it. The full graphical arsenal is deployed – artists’ impressions of gleaming buildings, the sweeping pathways and impeccable grass. Computer animations take the viewer on an effortless stroll through the estate, a beatific vision of the life they could lead. On day one, an idyll, for how long? The odds are poor, non-virtual footage insists on proving the point. But that comes later, that comes at the end, that comes too late.

So, let the city-planners see more – the ghost of buildings-future, a counterpoint to the utopian propaganda. Let them watch the rough-and-tumble of reality played out in virtual time, without ever risking a brick. Hand over the pitch-perfect images to a crack team of the clumsy and disinterested, the careless and vindictive, the demolition man and graffiti artist. Then wait.

The cartoonish weather of a perfect yellow disk on uniform azure? The first to go. Even the ugliest place can be bleached clean under a summer sun. No, the true test comes in the desolation of a thunderstorm or below the chromatic monotony of clouds, variations on a theme of grey, senses as muted as the palette.

Fast-forward now, through the wear and tear of existence, show homes long forgotten. Once blindingly-white walls are now a dulled and off-putting cream, stained with rusty streaks by the rainwater forever dribbling from the porous gutters. Green moss sprouts here and there, adding an insidious organic trim. Within the reaches of idle hands – for he’s here too – urban murals have occupied every available canvas. This new art ages too, and is itself defaced. Tags, electronic, or not, thrive.

Inside the tower a hooded figure sets his back to the broken closed circuit TV and propels a liquid Slinky down failing steps. Its progress is caught in freeze-frame by half-hearted fluorescent tubes, forever on the verge of getting going, but then never do. Come the evening the remaining strands of piss will have frozen and sent an elderly resident tumbling in the darkness, the lights by then finally given up. Skull split and leaking, his blood will add a welcome contrast to the dreary concrete. The steps, half-crumbled, still hard enough to break both bone and brain. They’ll break more than that yet.

Outdoors, the three oblivious children who spun a roundabout at gleeful speeds have been replaced man-for-man by older, more sullen sorts who insist on keeping a stationary, furtive council on the rusting, circular steelwork. Of the nearby swings, only one remains whole. Another dangles at a limp half mast, and the last is no longer what it was, its seat long-since propelled through a nearby window. The window, too, is no longer that, but peeling, mottled chipboard.

Yellow-hatted men probe the tower blocks with high-power drills, infiltrating the concrete skeletons with mile after mile of cable. It must be hooked up, every room, every corridor, every shaft must be connected, the building must be riddled with power. And then the lights go on and it’s a derby. The crowd gasps and cheers even as the dust rushes towards them. Eyes shut, lights out now and everybody home. Brush off the evidence and awake, dazed in a shared hangover. Then think.

Clear the rubble and begin again. Eyes open, brew the tea, and whistle. A perfect pitch.

Regular readers of my blog will have noticed a distinct lack of posts in the past month or so. This wasn’t due to laziness on my part, but rather that I was extremely busy with, first helping to organise the Polyglot Gathering Berlin (I produced the booklet), and then actually attending the event. It’s one week since it finished and what better way to end my blog-writing hiatus than with some thoughts and impressions from Berlin.

Background

First some background. Richard Simcott and Luca Lampariello, two well-known internet language enthusiasts, organised the inaugural Polyglot Conference 2013 in beautiful Budapest. Though I didn’t attend that event, it was by all accounts a huge success, and so inspired, Judith Meyer (herself an accomplished polyglot) decided to organise a companion event for 2014, and so the Polyglot Gathering Berlin was conceived.

Presentations

I attended so many truly excellent presentations that they are in fact too numerous to list here. Here’s a sample:

Dr. Michele Gazzola – surely a polyglot gathering is one of the few places that you could have a speaker scheduled to talk about language & politics unfortunately pull out at short notice, only to find that another such expert is in the room and with a presentation virtually ready to go? To everyone’s immense gratitude, Dr. Michele Gazzola delivered a very persuasive and data-driven talk on the necessity of the EU continuing its full multilingual policy for official documents. This narrow topic broadened into a full discussion of what it means for political bodies to represent their citizen members, a core part of democracy.

Emiel Visser – there were a number of excellent overview courses of different languages at the Gathering. I very much enjoyed Emiel Visser’s systematic and thorough overview of the Japanese language, including the writing system, pronunciation, basic syntax and information on various learning resources. I knew the writing system was difficult, but had not appreciated just how multifaceted it actually is. I’m intimidated and intrigued in equal measure. However, as I enjoy writing haikus, not to mention Japanese cinema, I feel that someday it might be nice to learn to read the original versions of these wonderful poems, or at least begin to appreciate how they function in the original Japanese. It could be a long road.

Simon Ager who runs the impressively comprehensive omniglot.com, an online encyclopaedia of writing systems & languages, gave a talk that in my mind was a useful companion piece to Michele Gazzola’s presentation. In his talk he gave some shocking examples of the poor treatment of speakers of minority languages by speakers of the majority language, as well as an insightful exploration of the various tensions and conflicts that can prevent a minority language speaker passing on their language. These human examples lend emotional weight to the more pragmatic considerations of Dr. Gazzola. As Simon explained, some languages, such as Hebrew, have managed to rise again, though it’s far from a straightforward process and can give rise to disagreements about just what the language is when it is revived, as has happened in the case of Cornish. Sadly, from the statistics he presented, it’s clear that many minority languages will disappear without trace.

Alex Rawlings, who to his credit gave two talks at the Gathering, provided his audience with some useful ways to approach higher-level language learning using literature. One tip is to only look up a word when it has appeared four or five times in relatively quick succession. I was particularly drawn to this talk because of the focus on literature, which, as I’ve written before, was what drew me back into language learning after so many years away from it. It didn’t hurt that he gave a short reading in German of another of my favourite authors, in this case the opening from Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Prof. Bernard Comrie gave a fascinating talk covering his career in linguistics, including a rundown of all the various ways that languages represent numbers & counting. Having ten fingers seems to suggest that base 10 is the one obvious and logical choice for counting, but I realised that’s just a lack of imagination on my part. Why not count fingers and then your wrist, elbow, shoulder, chest, and back down the other side?

Richard Simcott who, aside from his impressive achievements in language learning (see this video from the conference for an example), is also a genuinely all-round nice guy, gave an insight into his daily routine and how he manages “to sneak” multiple languages in there everyday. To top it all, he’s still learning new ones, including what possibly became the conference’s favourite and most talked about conlang, Toki Pona.

The best thing though, is that the majority of the talks were recorded and will be uploaded onto YouTube in due course. I’m looking forward to catching up on the sessions I missed and rewatching my favourites.

Personal note

Of course, this gathering wasn’t only about sitting in lecture rooms listening to presentations. It was supposed to be fun, not work, and there was plenty of time available for mingling with language learners from around the world, everybody sharing life stories, language tips and aspects of their own culture. Again there are too many moments to mention, but a few highlights include meeting Andrew Williams who has lived his life assiduously following his father’s advice to study one new language every year. He’s somewhere around language number 60 now, and yet ever so humble. Meeting people like that really does alter your perspective on just what is possible if you apply sufficient time and dedication to a pursuit. His personal encouragement has meant that I’m finally starting to learn Farsi (and making rash promises about it too. Is it possible to be too inspired? That’s a story for another time).

Another highlight was getting to meet Olly Richards of I Will Teach You a Language. Olly and I have corresponded a little regarding blogging and when I was putting together the conference booklet, and I even recently contributed to an article of his about difficulties in language learning. As the cliche has it, it was good to put a face to a name. Even though we’re able now to meet people through the internet, sometimes becoming very good friends, there’s still nothing quite like that eventual meeting in person.

On that theme, I find it incredibly uplifting that a conference this long, varied and successful, was organised by a team of people who’ve assembled through the internet. In my case the first time I actually met my co-organisers was when I arrived at the A & O Hostel on Saturday 14th June. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them all for their hard work, I can say without hesitation that it was worth it! I just hope they have had a good rest because…

…in news to warm the hearts of language lovers everywhere, Judith has just announced that there will be a Polyglot Gathering 2015. I can hardly wait! Now where did I put that Farsi textbook?

In my next post I’ll be writing about a small publishing house that I am certain will be of interest to anyone who loves both literature and languages.

Last Thursday the Harry Ransom Center, at the University of Texas, announced that it had secured the rights to hold the entire literary archive of novelist Ian McEwan. This collection is to include drafts of stories, notes, letters, and his complete 17 years of email correspondence history. All for the bargain price of £1.2 million. I’ll take two! At least we’ve discovered one way to make a fortune from a career of writing literary fiction. Though I imagine the filming of his novel Atonement didn’t hurt.

The grubby details of filthy lucre aside, this announcement prompts other prurient thoughts. The first concerned the contents of his email archive. Is it truly the entirety or just those between his literary buddies Amis, Hitchens, Barnes and the rest? Or will there be every piece of trivia imaginable, from the restaurant booking enquiry, train ticket refund complaint, spam emails that somehow made their way past the filter and were never deleted? Will personal details be redacted? If so, how long will it take before those redactions that seem reasonable and necessary today, become the subject of conspiratorial, literary intrigue and over-reaching scholarly debate hamstrung by confirmation bias? Will McEwan be tempted to delete any emails that paint him in a less flattering light, or did the library pay extra for a signed guarantee that the archive would be delivered whole and unexpurgated?

In light of this, one wonders if I, and other aspiring writers of today, should now put a little extra effort into each and every email that is sent, peppering them with literary gems and flecks of waggish wit? Imagine, how disappointing if they were found to be uniformly trite and bland, of absolutely no exterior interest. Will there be anything in McEwan’s correspondence to approach the poignant sentiments that Vincent Van Gogh expressed when writing to his brother Theo?

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it.

Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.

This week I’m delighted to announce that my short story, Letter to Thoreau, has been published in a literary/arts magazine called Brev Spread. You can find it at their homepage or directly download the magazine here. Letter to Thoreau is a playful epistle, a gentle pastiche, the unaware writer of which challenges Henry David Thoreau’s conclusions that he famously reached in his volume Walden.

In addition to my story, the issue is packed full of artwork, short stories, essays, poetry and an interview. Starting at the very beginning, particular personal highlights include the melancholy front cover artwork by Annlyn Huang (visit her website for more here ), which features a heartbreakingly tender moment of a lonely red car singing its life story to itself, and to unknown distant observers, as it navigates a tangled road. Is it driving towards a future life, or is it heading back in time into the confusing morass of memory, which becomes evermore difficult to unpick and navigate with any reliability the further back it reaches? The red car is us, and we it; we must explore our individual memories alone.

A second highlight is an extensive interview with Rob Wilson, a poet and Professor of Literature, Creative Writing, and Cultural Studies at the University of California. The discussion is chock-full of thought-provoking deliberations on poetry, the act of writing, philosophy and the purpose of education & universities. I leave you with an excerpt from Promise Place by Rob Wilson, which I found particularly striking.

as Joni Mitchell famously sang in her song Woodstock, a beautiful piece of poetry that contains a scientific truth.

In the following short video, we see the opposite, as the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Fenyman produces poetry out of scientific exposition.

In his explanation of how trees grow he says “they come out of the air”, the carbon, the water, almost everything they need to grow comes from the atmosphere; trees are made of air.

Then in the reverse process, piled up in the wood-burning stove or fireplace, the flames that we see, that spectral light and heat, “That’s the light and heat of the sun that went in… it’s stored sun.” A tender truth to warm the heart and what beautiful ways to look at everyday things.

In Tom Sharpe’s grotesque yet hilarious novel The Throwback, the protagonist Lockhart must find his natural father and, in order to fully meet the terms of his grandfather’s will, flog the man to within an inch of his life. With a suspect at hand and gagged, the officiators of the will begin to debate the practical meaning of the will’s instructions.

‘An inch of life,’ said Dr Magrew, ‘leaves us in fact two inches to play with, one before death and one after.’

After much humorous discussion, the solution is reached, and a crime scene outline is drawn on the wall around the soon-to-be victim, at the precise distance of one inch from the body.

‘Lockhart, my boy, you may go ahead and flog the wall up to the pencil line and you will have flogged the man to within an inch of his life.’

An inch of his life. Don’t give an inch. To inch our way forward. Inch by inch. In these metric times, though time itself is not yet that, perhaps these Imperial nouns and verbs should give way to their modern, metric descendants.

Lockhart must thrash the man to within a centimetre of his life, never giving a centimetre. A centimetre is shorter than an inch, we have short-changed our language, diminished the story, perhaps we should have used an exact conversion. We 2.54-centimetre our way forward to a solution, 2.54-centimetres by 2.54-centimetres. Taking the definition of a metre from the 17th General Conference on Weights and Measures, we can even say that Lockhart must flog his father to within 0.0254 of the distance travelled by light in a vacuum during the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Completely modern and scientific language. Progress. On second thoughts, maybe not.

In Gomorrah, a book for which Roberto Saviano received both awards and death threats, Saviano’s target was the Camorra (a mafia-like organisation). While that book stood proudly in plain sight on bookshop shelves, the words within unfortunately sent him into hiding. Uncowed, in this slender but powerful book, The Ring, two short stories, told in two distinctive voices, see Saviano once again sets his sights on the mafia, but they are not the only target.

The Ring by Roberto Saviano

Opening with a quote from French writer Boris Vian, “If you must have blood, then give of your own, if it so amuses you.”, the thematic tone of the book is set and one can hear it throughout – a subtextual refrain, delivered in a wearied anger. The first story, The Ring, tells of a mafia revenge tragedy, recounted by a friend of the victims. Deft touches reveal cultural traditions without fuss, while the narrator tries to make the reader and an old female friend understand the truth of his situation. His frustration is clear, as she presumes his friends to have been mafioso. The mafia saw them as guilty by association and had them killed, she sees them guilty of being mafioso because the mafia killed them. They’re guilty either way, no matter what, condemned for being alive.

This Catholic idea of original sin runs throughout The Ring, apparently the mafia have found it to be just as useful a tool of social control as the church has. Extending the religious parallel presents the town as a kind of purgatory, the inhabitants of which are eager to leave if only they could find the opportunity. But there are none, there never are. By his repeated emphasis of this point, the author surely intends an implied criticism of the Church. Where are they in all of this tragedy?

In the second story, The Opposite of Death, a young girl is widowed before she can even reach the altar, her husband-to-be killed whilst serving in Afghanistan. The narrative unpicks the negotiation of the aftermath of his death, which death too is put at the feet of both the government and mafia. The young deceased enlisted in the army to escape the clutches of organised crime. Violence seems inescapable. Only the state-sanctioned version has the veneer of respectability, yet it’s clear, through the enumeration into blurred forgetfulness of “the latest war”, that Saviano takes a dim view of his government. For in both organisations, power and reward flow equally to the top, leaving those at the bottom to suffer, and how.

If it is the young men who suffer most directly, their women and families left behind are shattered, destroyed in a different way and able only to mourn and to reach some reconciliation with their fate. It’s not clear that they ever will. Throughout the book, the ring of the title is a recurring motif and an appropriate symbol of the apparent eternal state in which his country and its citizens are destined to reside. Wedded, too – a marriage of convenience to organised crime, with no prospect of a divorce.

Altogether the book runs to an economical 75 pages, but the one thing Saviano refuses to be economical with is the truth. On the front of the dustcover there is a quote from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago:

I feel humble, almost insignificant, faced with the dignity and the courage of the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano.

On the occasion of the campaign group Liberty‘s 80th birthday, the Guardian published the thoughts of such writers, thinkers, and activists, as Julian Barnes, Edward Snowden, and Shami Chakrabarti, on the topic of liberty. I highly recommend that you read it, and to that illustrious list, I add some of my own thoughts below.

On Liberty

Of the many things that are passed down to us, our individual freedoms and liberties count among the most important. Codified in law we are protected from overreach and abuse by the state, but we cannot live off past triumphs forever. And there have been some major triumphs – the UN Declaration of Human Rights, The Geneva Conventions, The International Criminal Court. Yet these achievements are not monuments for us to admire; they are not merely to be a reminder of our forebears’ courage and intelligence. For if we treat them as such, they will surely become so.

As with any monument left out in the cold for too long, they will be corroded by the political climate, denuded one liberty at a time, as we are made to believe that it was only the loss of ornament and nothing fundamental. That is until one day the monument is toppled in an inverted revolution. If we have walked past it every day with our admiration turned to indifference, how will we notice if it is gone?

These liberties we possess are strong and they give us strength too, but, like us, they are not indestructible; their vulnerabilities must be met with energy and vigour. Campaigning, letter writing, petitions, protests, defending the powerless, donating time and money, correcting always the self-interested arguments of the powerful, and guarding too against our own exploitable prejudices. If we do nothing, we will find our revered monuments to be made of sand, which as Jimi Hendrix sang, “And so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually.”